Dell EMC Unity vs. HPE 3PAR Flash Storage

As of February 2019, Dell EMC Unity is ranked 2nd in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 114 reviews vs HPE 3PAR Flash Storage which is ranked 1st in All-Flash Storage Arrays with 115 reviews. The top reviewer of Dell EMC Unity writes "Hits a sweet spot for us between price point and the amount of storage and performance". The top reviewer of HPE 3PAR Flash Storage writes "The flexibility and ability to adjust to business needs is where its robustness is". Dell EMC Unity is most compared with NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS), HPE 3PAR Flash Storage and Pure Storage FlashArray. HPE 3PAR Flash Storage is most compared with Dell EMC Unity, Nimble Storage and NetApp AFF (All Flash FAS). See our Dell EMC Unity vs. HPE 3PAR Flash Storage report.

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

We like the way it integrates with our environment. These features help us use multiple soft applications. The new features of going off the grid and replicating really help us. They give us an advantage versus traditional storage resources.It is easy to scale, maintain, and manage.They have a Unity REST API that I use to automate some of the storage stuff. I'm just getting started with it, but it seems pretty easy to use.It has saved us time when provisioning new storage, so we're trying to automate that process.Compared to our old platform, everything is more tightly integrated. I don't have to go to different sections to do something. A lot of it is wizard-driven, so it's an easy to use system.Integration; We use the product with VMware, and also use it with Syft for home directory and departmental shares.Purchasing; We worked with a sales rep to purchase our Unity.They've integrated NAS and SAN pretty well. It made replication very simple. Because one of our systems has a lot of LANs, for it to replicate we have Consistency Groups in there. That's something that is really helpful, making sure that everything is working not just for replication but for backups as well.

Scalability, because our customer is fast growing and our solution should be able to start very small and grow very quickly.The chunklet technology is the main benefit out of 3PAR. The way it subdivides. It is using more logic to subdivide the drives into smaller pieces.With our 3PARs, we have never lost data.With the new flash arrays, 3PAR has improved our performance.The new StoreServ Management Console (SSMC) tool is more user-friendly.HPE can login, fix things, alert us to things, and upgrade. We are there and aware, but we do not do the work. So, that is good.3PAR is easy to keep running and does not require too much effort. It has been very reliable, which is key.The scalability is good because it is easy to add in new disks. We just add them on the fly, and they are available for use.

We would like an AI feature that would protect the backup and minimize the consumed space so we can maintain the quality of the backup. This would help us minimize our IT cost in terms of the backup procedures.The support portal needs fixing. Accessing a service request on the support portal seems to be a bit difficult, as opposed to just calling the 800 number.Dell EMC Unity's competitor, NetApp, has a similar product. However, it has a clustering technology where you can group multiple systems together, then you can move data from one system to another seamlessly. I would like the Unity to do that.It would be nice to have been able to easily move off our old VNX system to this system. The process is very manual.The iSCSI and the VMware integation using vSphere could be less confusing.It needs deduplication. We'd like to have the dedupe capabilities in the Unity.There are a lot of things that can be done with it. It's got Cloud IQ, but I think it's not as mature as it could be, they could make it more effective. They could make it more comparable to some of the other products out there that have cloud analytics. The amount of insight that the Unity product is able to give, at this point, is okay, but not class-leading. Some of the other data-reduction technologies, like deduplication, are not to the level of other competitors and what their products provide.I don't know where the hybrid cloud might be going or what connectivity there is between what was recently released as far as AWS and being able to manage both of them. Maybe there is an on-prem and an AWS instance in the same window, like a single pane, but I would like to see something along those lines, where there wouldn't be two locations to manage storage.

Security is a mandatory feature because our customer needs to protect delicate information.I would like to see a faster Ethernet connection. Right now, it is 10G. If they could do multiple hundred gigs to speed up the transfer from the array to the servers, that would be good. We are trying to get away from Fibre Channel.We need additional enhancements to InfoSight, especially from a VM standpoint. Today, we can see in the Azure VM performance stats in 3PAR, but it is so huge, we can't just drill down on each and every VM and look at its performance.We are seeing that there are some enhancements which are required in the SSMC console. There are some features that we do not see in the dashboard.There are some weird things that we can't figure out.I would like to see the ability to be able to migrate to newer versions of the 3PAR without having to take any of our data offline and be able to upgrade on the fly.We would like to see better support for iSCSI.A lot of tasks, you have to manually set up. They need to already have them set up and working. Then, you can just go in and tweak them if you need to.

Go with the virtual appliance versus the hardware.Licensing is fine. We worked with a sales rep to purchase our Unity.The pricing is reasonable. We're using the Flex on Demand pricing. It's really good for us when we pay for what we use. It made it easy to get it inside since it's an OpEx and instead of CapEx expense.Currently, we buy directly from Dell EMC. We've tried going through resellers before, but we've found that if we go directly through Dell EMC, we get a good a price from being with the government.The pricing is competitive. We miss some of the feature functionality that we had with the XtremeIOs but it's certainly suitable for the purpose.In the SQL Server instances in our data warehouse, we immediately saw a great return on investment.Licensing is a little bit confusing. Going through everything with them, there are a lot of line items to go over. Every single thing is broken down into a line item, and it starts to get really confusing in terms of what we're actually purchasing when it comes to the product.The ROI is right where we need it to be. It's a reasonably priced array.

Making the decisions to buy it can be complex.Since the prices of the flash storage has gone down tremendously, I would definitely recommend going for the all-flash storage array or 3PAR. It is a big expensive even now, but it will be the future of all industries.You can't get software maintenance from a third party. You have to do it from HPE, which is a letdown.3PAR was quite a bit less money than EMC, and that was one of the deciding factors.We had to go back and purchase iLO licenses and brocade switches for the flex fabric to have a complete solution.Cost-wise, it is a little bit on the higher side, but it is an awesome product.We are going to buy eight nodes this year and eight nodes next year. Eventually, we are not going to want to buy large storage devices and probably utilize just storage, but in a different manner going forward.It is a little more money, but it is worth it because it does it better.

Dell EMC Unity’s All-Flash and Hybrid Flash storage platforms optimize SSD performance and efficiency, with fully integrated SAN and NAS capabilities. Cloud-based storage analytics and proactive support keep you available and connected.

HP 3PAR all-flash storage accelerates business agility by boosting application performance with over 900,000 IOPS at less than 0.7 ms latency. And it does this while delivering all the enterprise-class, Tier-1 features and functionality you expect from the storage platform that powers three of the world’s four largest managed service providers.

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